For a Spicier City, Turn the Page?

Published: August 4, 2012

If two books, strikingly similar in manner and published within a few weeks of each other can be said to suggest a trend, then the arrival of “Motherland,” a story of midlife shenanigans in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and “Triburbia,” a story of midlife shenanigans south of Canal Street in Manhattan, signals the emergence of a new strain of pop domestic fiction. It’s one in which erotic destiny is ordained by school district — sexual dalliance facilitated by the Department of Education.

Big City Book Club

In honor of Nora Ephron, who died in June, the Big City Book Club will revisit her early work as a journalist and essayist.

In the 1960s and ’70s, she wrote for magazines like Rolling Stone, New York and The New Yorker — pieces collected in the anthologies “Crazy Salad” and “Wallflower at the Orgy.” We’re going to focus on “Wallflower” because it’s still in print. But “Crazy Salad” has just been reissued as an e-book, so we’ll touch on it, too.

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Consider the example of Karen Bryan Shapiro in “Motherland,” an overweight woman who is left by her lawyer husband for a transsexual, and as a result, is so financially constrained that she is forced to suffer the greater indignity of spending the entire summer in town. Were it not for the vagaries of rezoning that ultimately land her child at P.S. 282, would she ever have found someone like Wesley, the sweet and attentive ex-drug dealer not long out of prison? No. Instead she would have been subjected to the more cruelly scrutinizing sensibilities of the divorced fathers at P.S. 321 with their creative-class striving and yoga-body imperatives.

“Motherland,” Amy Sohn’s sequel to her best-selling book, “Prospect Park West,” and “Triburbia,” a first novel by the journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld — are each born more of inevitability than imagination. In a city that long ago relinquished so much of its mythology to the rapture of upper-income parenting and its attendant diet of chemical-free everything, it was a matter as sure as the rise of transit fares that we would eventually be made to think about the rituals of morning drop-off and afternoon pickup as the predominant context for forbidden sex.

Each of the two books revolves around the broader community of a highly ranked public elementary school: P.S. 321 in Park Slope and what is obviously P.S. 234 in TriBeCa, places so readily linked to an image of concerned liberal affluence that to a certain kind of New Yorker they hardly require annotation. Here the image of family wholesomeness gives way to a picture of acute marital anomie and rampant infidelity. Stereotypes endemic to the city populate: the entrepreneurial chef, the yearning screenwriter, the drifting vintage clothier, the gay father desperate for a second child, all of them sharing an aversion or mounting indifference to the partners with whom they’ve purchased their co-ops, renovated their kitchens and shared the enervating burdens of modern child rearing.

Earlier this year, the conservative social critic Charles Murray notoriously argued that the country’s swelling inequality could be blamed in part on elites of the kind depicted here, who had neglected to “preach what they practice.” In his view, it was incumbent upon the educated and prosperous — who perpetuate their good fortune by divorcing less than those in the lower classes, and ostensibly fretting more over their children — to instruct the masses in the ways of stability and good sense. In these books, where love children are conceived and chaos escalates, the urban bourgeoisie is stripped of its right to moral imperiousness.

Those who don’t live in New York and might think of it as a place where relationships aren’t circumscribed by neighborhood and where a certain anonymity is assured will wonder how much of what is rendered in these novels is just hokum.

Of course, liberties have been taken and exaggerations have been made. But the New York of the current moment is a place where neighborhoods have become increasingly branded, identities ever more narrow and fixed. Cobble Hill is the name of a historic brownstone patch of Brooklyn and also the name of a furniture line — and by implication, a specific way of life — at ABC Carpet and Home.

We are all social locavores now as much as culinary ones, and with that has come a kind of insularity and tightening, a heightened perception of who is immediately around us, an obsession with neighborhood blogs, an awareness of local gossip — the divorcée around the corner who has been seeing the married city official, the prominent architect who has been dating one single mother a few doors down while possibly chasing others at his children’s private school.

It has been endlessly argued that the city has become too suburban, too dull, too focused on the very, very young. The latest proof of this came last week with news of a Bloomberg administration initiative to more aggressively push breast-feeding in the city’s hospitals. Beginning in September, nurses in various hospitals will be made to sign out baby formula as if it were medication and explain to mothers who ask for it that their own bodily milk is best. It hardly bears remarking that these orders were not handed down in Patti Smith’s New York, or for that matter even Rudy Giuliani’s.

Both “Motherland” and “Triburbia” offer postures of narrative defense against the notion that New York is now a boring, commitment-obsessed place. They want to show us that for many people, lunchtime isn’t just for farro. But reading these books, you are left with cause for even further lament — the worry that perhaps even our adultery has gotten lazy. Is proximity the only aphrodisiac?

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2012, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: For a Spicier City, Turn the Page?.